Copyright 2002 by Richard Seltzer
Originally published by Wiley. The rights have reverted to the author
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You have probably used some of these capabilities (like free email) but are unaware of the range of what's available, and the implications in terms of the business activities you can engage in as an individual, at no cost and without using your company's resources or affecting your company's brand identity.
Keep in mind that change comes quickly on the Internet. The ability to adapt to new business conditions is very important to the survival and growth of Internet companies, particularly ones offering free services. They'll reorganize their entire site without warning or explanation, take away some services, others, and change their terms.
To take advantage of free service offerings, you need to be flexible and creative. If you find that a site or service does not match what is described here, presume there has been a design change. Check Help, Frequently Asked Questions, or Sitemap to reorient yourself. If the service or even the Web site has gone away, try one of the alternatives mentioned here.
Required assignments for Chapter One:
• sign up for a free email account;
• sign up for a free Web hosting service; create a business card page
and a home page
Electives:
• experiment with other free services
• participate in email discussion, newsgroups, forum, chat, etc.
As you go through these exercises, keep asking how you could use such
a service in your business or your personal life. What is the business
model behind this service? How does the provider benefit from my participation?
Why should you want a new email account?
In this bootcamp, we'll be leading you through a series of exercises to help you become an active player on the Internet. You will be trying things that you've never tried before. Hence, you need set up a safe area for yourself, where you can make mistakes and test ideas without what you are doing interfering with your normal business and family activities. If you use your normal work-related email account, with your company name in the address, what you do might in some way reflect on the company that you work for.
You might, also, at some point want to apply for jobs at other companies. In that case, it helps to have an email address that is not company-related, one that you can, with confidence, include in your resume and in correspondence related to new job opportunities.
Also, you can use different email accounts to help manage your correspondence. For instance, you could use your Hotmail account to sign up for email discussions, and another address for receiving advertising messages about products and services you are really interested in, but that you wouldn't want cluttering your business email account.
Go to hotmail.com. Sign up. Be careful to just sign up for the email service -- not for the many publications they'll ask you to subscribe to. When you arrive at the email Inbox, click on Compose and send a test message to your regular email account. Then log on at your regular account and send a message to your new Hotmail address.
You can read your Hotmail email from anywhere. You don't need to use your own PC or Mac, and you don't have to be connected by way of your regular Internet Service Provider (ISP). All you need is a Web browser connected to the Internet.
Notice that every email you send will have a one-line Microsoft (MSN) ad. And every time you go back to check for messages or to send messages, you'll see banner ads and links to other MSN services.
To get other email-related capabilities for free, try:
• www.hushmail.com for e-mail with encryption and digital signatures
• www.whalemail.com to send and receive large email files (up to 50
Mbytes)
Eventually, you may wish to use that ISP-provided space. In that case, you should check their help files and call their support people for specific instructions. Procedures vary widely from one company to another.
But, first, both to learn and to gain confidence, you should sign up
at one of the free Web hosting services that are not tied to your Internet
access. Some of the larger services include:
• www.angelfire.com (owned by Terra Lycos)
• www.tripod.com (owned by Terra Lycos)
• www.geocities.com (owned by Yahoo)
• www.nbci.com. (which bought Xoom)
• www.homestead.com
• www.expage.com
Go to Angelfire and register. They'll give you 50 Mbytes of free Web space. In plain text, that's the equivalent of a hundred copies of Huckleberry Finn.
When registering, use one of the new email addresses that you just created. You'll be forced to choose one of their pre-set directories, which will become part of your address. Once you've done that, click on "Click here to Start Building".
First, create a simple business-card page. Choose to create a new file and name it businesscard.html. The suffix ".html" tells browsers how to handle the content you provide. Click on "Create". Select Basic (instead of Advanced).
Choose the "My Info Layout". Select "Style Sheet #1", and "Submit". Leave the default settings as they are, and enter as the title "Business card for [your name]". Use the "Add a List" or "Create Links" features, if you like; and change the numbers accordingly. If not, change the number for each of those choices to zero. Then, in the text block, enter the information you would like to include on your business card. Click "Save".
To see what you have created, enter the Web address in your browser,
e.g.,
http://www.angelfire.com/directorycategory/yourdirectoryname/businesscard.html
e.g., http://www.angelfire.com/biz6/bootcamp/businesscard.html
Now anyone, anywhere in the world can see that page by just entering that address in their browser.
Next, use Backup in your browser to go back to the Web Shell (where you select what page to edit or create). You'll see that your business card page is now listed there. To view the page, highlight its name and click "View file". To make changes, highlight its name and click Edit.
Now edit the index page that they have assigned you, which is also known
as your "home page". Highlight index.html, and click "Edit". The index
is the page you get to when you just type the directory name. In other
words, you could get to it by entering either
http://www.angelfire.com/directorycategory/yourdirectoryname
e.g.
http://www.angelfire.com/biz6/bootcamp
or the full address
e.g., http://www.angelfire.com/biz6/bootcamp/index.html
Delete the name that they have for "main image" (or you'll wind up with
an Angelfire logo). Edit as you like, and enter the text that you'd like
to appear. Under "Create Links", make a link to your business-card page.
To do that, under "URL", enter http://www.angelfire.com/directorycategory/yourdirectoryname/businesscard.html
And under "Description", enter "My Business Card". Click "Save".
Now view your index page, and click on the link you just created for your business card page.
Next, backup, select your business card page, and click "Edit". Under
"Create Links", raise the number by one, click Refresh, then add a link
to your home page.
e.g. http://www.angelfire.com/biz6/bootcamp
Save. View the page. Test the link.
If you have pictures saved on your hard drive, scroll down the Web Shell page to "File Upload" and "Browse" to select pictures that you'd like to include on your Web pages. Then use the page creation templates to add those images where you would like (entering the full name of each file, including the extension, which will probably be .jpg or .gif).
You can experiment as much as you like here. Nobody will know that these pages exist unless you tell them. Edit and reedit. See what happens when you make different choices. Add links to your favorite Web pages. Add lists. Create more pages. Check the "Help" and "Tool Center" areas for instructions on how to add fancy effects.
You are now a Web publisher. Yes, every page you create will have Angelfire advertising at the top. And these pages are designed in ways that might make them difficult to find by search engines. But if you are creative, you could do some useful and fun things with this space.
For our purposes, you should open at least one more account. Go to NBCi.com. They offer unlimited Web space (while Angelfire limits you to 50 Mbytes).
You won't see this offer immediately. It's buried among many other free services. The site owners would probably love for you to get lost here, exploring again and again, getting the impression that whatever you might need that's related to the Internet is probably buried here somewhere.
Click the "Join now!" button. Then click on the "Membership Form." Fill out the form. Unless you love to receive junk mail, don't indicate any areas of interest, and remove the check marks indicating that you want to get email from them. Also, when you pick a member name and password, keep in mind that the system is "case sensitive". If you enter any upper case characters, you'll have to remember that they are upper case. (As a rule of thumb, I always enter such information all in lower case -- that makes it easier to remember).
Click to go back to the Home page and then click once again on "Join Now!" The help page you arrive at lists the various free services that you can sign up for.
Under "Web Site Building & Hosting", click on "Free storage space for your Web site." Their current offer of free unlimited space means that "there is no limit on how many files you upload to your account", as long as you do not violate their "Terms of Service Agreement". Click to see the Terms of Service. For related details, click on Frequently Asked Questions.
The pages that you create here will have an address in the form
http://members.nbci.com/your_membername/
If your member name is jones5 and you create a page which you call
myson.html, after that page is uploaded, you'll be able to see it on the
Web at
http://members.nbci.com/jones5/myson.html
From the home page, click on My NBCi. Then click on My Web Site. "New users, click here to activate your Web site." You'll be asked to enter your email address (use your new one) and to copy an "activation code" into a form. Be careful to reproduce the letters and numbers exactly. This is case sensitive. The code is probably intended to block automated programs from using this service. (Whenever something useful is offered for free, people find creative ways to abuse it.)
NBCi (AKA Xoom) used to offer free template-based tools for building Web pages, but have discontinued that service. In Chapter Three, you'll learn how to create pages on your own PC (rather than using Web-based templates) and how to then upload those pages to the Web with a standard utility (FTP = file transfer protocol). Then we'll start to build a real site in your NBCi space.
For now, click on My Website and check the wide variety of other free services available at NBCi. You could set up another email account here. In fact, they give you one automatically when you sign up with Web space; you just have to activate it. If you do, you'll have an address of the form usename@email.com You can also set up your own chat rooms, personalize your online auction pages, and setup an online store (by way of Bigstep.com).
All the major "portal" sites, like Yahoo, Excite, MSN, AOL, etc. offer
you a wide range of free services. Any one of these could become your one-stop
place to get everything you need for a great Web experience -- from Web
search and directory services, to Web design tools, to discussion areas,
to shopping, to content. They strive to earn your loyalty, to get you to
come back again and again. But you have many choices for all these services
they offer -- all free. And there is no reason for you to use just
one such site. Hence the statistics these sites provide about how many
members they have, how many Web sites they host, and how many email accounts
they have are misleading. Many people open accounts, create Web pages,
etc. and then never return or return rarely, having found other services
they like better. Today there are over a billion pages on the Web. But
hundreds of millions of those pages may be accounted for in Web sites that
have been abandoned by their owners, who have no incentive to delete them
since the space they reside on is free.
And sometimes "free" is far too expensive. The provider of the free service deliberately makes the experience so annoying that you'll be willing to pay to get rid of the nuisance. That's the case with free Internet access today.
Connect to www.juno.com or www.netzero.com and download their free access software. Even if you already have Internet access from home, in addition to access from work, you might find good use for an account like this. If you travel a lot and take your laptop with you, you'll be able to dial-in to local numbers for free from just about anywhere in the US, to use the Web and send email. (You'll get another email account with this new service).
But the price is high -- very high. Juno's "guide" and related advertising will litter your screen and get in your way at every turn. With free Juno, when you are connected to the Internet, their banner stays on your screen even when you use other applications on your computer and covers other output. In other words, if you try to open a new application by clicking on Start and then Programs, the Juno banner will cover a large part of your screen, making it difficult for you to see and select the program you want.
Ironically, free Internet access services are primarily used by newbies -- the people who are most easily confused and frustrated by the ads and other "features" these services tack on that make the Internet more difficult to use.
What we see is a variant of the old supply-demand rule. In areas where there are many flourishing services, they compete with one another by reducing the nuisances and making their service easy to use and friendly. But where there are very few services and what they provide is in high demand, the providers can pile on advertising, limitations, and requirements for long-term commitment.
During the period of the dot.com crash (starting in the spring of 2000), many free Internet access services went away, including those once offered by AltaVista, Worldspy, Freewwweb, 1stup, Spinway, Bluelight, and Excite. Only Juno (4 million users) and NetZero (7 million users) remain today. Their approach is rather like that of the airlines: the greater the level of hassle at the basic (economy class) level, the more the incentive to upgrade to premium (first class).
If you are interested in tracking the trends in the free ISP business,
check www.nzlist.org/user/freeisp for links to related news stories
Meanwhile, free services related to online discussion have been growing, with new capabilities and new entrants.
Online discussion -- linking people to people, rather than people to information or to automated functions -- probably draws more people to the Internet than any other capability, and keeps them coming back.
From the earliest email distribution lists, "usenet newsgroups" grew
as a way to link people with common interests and let them have their say
in a free-for-all environment. Today, there are tens of thousands of newsgroups,
at least one for every imaginable topic. Each of those groups typically
has dozens, if not hundreds of postings each day. Some postings are short
-- like email messages stuck on a bulletin board for interested people
to peruse. Others are articles or lengthy reference documents. Newsgroups
are a wild frontier territory where people speak candidly, sharing their
insights and experiences. If you want to know what your customers
really think of your product or your competitor's product, that's where
you should look.
If your ISP offers newsgroup service as part of its basic package,
you can read newsgroup postings through your Web browser or read and post
through Outlook Express or special newsreader software. In the past, Deja.com's
Web site made it easy for people who didn't have newsgroup service to read
any posting, to search through postings, and to post. But after a
long slow decline, Deja.com recently folded. Google bought their service,
and is now rebuilding it.
Meanwhile, a handful of little-known Web-based services help keep newsgroups
alive:
• newsone.net
• www.cyberfiber.com
• nooz.net
• www.news2web.com
In addition, numerous separate Web-based discussion and collaboration
services now thrive:
• www.intranets.com provides "a private space on the Web where your
group can easily access and share documents"
• www.multicity.com includes chat rooms, message boards, web polls,
instant messenger, etc., with instant automatic translation for 20 languages
• www.quicktopic.com combines email and Web-based discussion
• www.quickdot.com offers email-based discussion and collaboration
• www.delphi.com lets you create your own forums (bulletin boards)
and chats
• www.nicenet.org provides free forum-style discussion space for educational
purposes
• www.topica.com mail hosts email lists to help you manage your email
newsletter or discussion group
• www.server.com mail provides free community-style applications that
you can add to your Web site
• groups.yahoo.com/local/news.html (formerly egroups) helps you set
up and run your own email discussions
• www.webworkzone.com (from SiteScape.com) offers a paid service with
secure forums, chat, and collaborative sharing.
Some of these sites as well as major portals, like Yahoo, Tripod,
and Excite, provide free chat rooms as well.
Other sites, such as www.yack.com and www.talkcity.com, specialize in chat.
You should try at least one of these discussion sites now, as part of
your general orientation. In Chapter Five we'll talk about how to use existing
online discussion services to help promote your Web site and your personal
expertise. Then in Chapter Seven we'll deal with how to start and run your
own discussions in order to build content for your site, to attract traffic,
and to better serve your customers.
Likewise, the basic version of some software is available for free download over the Web or may come preinstalled on your PC. The vendors hope you'll try it, get used to it, and decide that you need it so much that you are willing to pay to get beyond the built-in limitations. MusicJukeBox does that especially well. After you've tried their music playing/management software, you are an easy prospect for their "plus" version with more features and also for a subscription for "lifetime upgrades," even though you don't know if you need them. It's that good, that much fun, that easy and convenient that if they are developing something even better, you are sure that you'd love that too.
Sometimes software is only free for a trial period; and when time runs out, you have to pay or stop using it.
Some companies combine these varieties of "free." For instance, you can try Log Analyzer, an excellent Web traffic tool from WebTrends that we'll look at in Chapter Six, for free for a month. Or you can try their free service WebTrends Live, which provides far less useful information and also requires you to put their advertising on your pages.
Or, as in the case of virus protection software, the software itself is free, but you have to pay for a subscription to get the updates, which are essential for the software to be effective.
Other, very useful software that you can try for free but which also comes in a "professional" version includes HumanClick (www.humanclick.com), which we'll discuss in Chapter Nine; and RealPlayer for playing streaming audio and video (www.real.com), which we'll cover in Chapter Eleven.
Trying to make sense of the Internet business environment
In the early days of the Internet, when everybody was undercutting everyone else on price, it seemed that the best business model was to offer a useful service for free (nobody could undercut you on that price) and build an audience, which would then be the basis for your real business. They saw one example after another of free software and service quickly attracting an audience, like Netscape and Yahoo. They presumed that once they had an audience, they could sell something to that audience and make a profit. But time and again, company B decided to build its audience by giving away what company A was trying to sell.
They were caught in the razor/razor blade bind. What's your razor and what's your razor blade? What should you give away or sell at a low price to build an audience? And what can you sell at a profit to the audience that you have won?
On the Internet, one company's razor is another's razor blade. Chances are good that someone else is giving away or soon will give away the very service that you were counting to profit on. (I first heard this concept discussed at Internet World in San Jose, April 1995).
This trend means that the Internet is a buyer's market, with interesting new capabilities continually being offered to end users for free or at low cost. Hence, new applications get adopted very rapidly, sometimes fundamentally changing how businesses can and should operate on the Web.
Caught in this trap, "successful" Web-based companies, with audiences in the millions, decided to follow the model of television and sell or rent their audiences (through advertising) to generate revenue. But banner advertising on the Web is far different from television advertising. It isn't just an interruption in the programming (a snack or nature break), but rather is a continuous distraction and an invitation to leave the site and go somewhere else. Unless used extremely well (placed on the right pages, including the right kinds of messages, and leading to lots of useful related detail and help), they simply donn't produce the level of sales that advertisers hope for. Banner advertising was not the answer. There is no one simple way to generate revenue from a Web audience.
Don't confuse marketshare and Internet audience. Your Internet audience
is the set of people who regularly access your Web pages and/or voluntarily
subscribe to your distribution lists. They may or may not ever buy anything
from you. Growth in terms of numbers of users is not necessarily
an indication of success -- you could be losing money with every new user,
with no payoff in sight.
In emerging markets, companies typically make major investments
to capture marketshare. They absorb large losses for a few years, with
the idea that as the market grows, they'll "own" a solid and predictable
percentage of that market and reap large profits over the long run. That
approach assumes that the market will follow predictable patterns of growth
and maturity. But on the Internet, some other player may decide to give
away the equivalent of your product or service in hopes of making money
in some other way. So regardless of how good your product is and how large
your audience is, your opportunities for future profit could evaporate.
(We'll discuss what you can and should do to turn your audience into profitable
business in Chapter Nine.)
Meanwhile, we also see a trend of specialization and multiple flexible partnerships. Web companies typically don't try to do everything themselves, but rather join forces with other companies to quickly and inexpensively offer new services to their audience. For instance, a company that provides free Internet search services might get its search index from one provider, get its directory from another, provide email service to its users through another, have arrangements with one or more companies that sell advertising for it, run its service on the machines of a Web hosting service, and provide online chat (voice or text) through another provider. Almost everything has been "out-sourced" Web-style, through partnering. And, invisible to Web site visitors, many of those arrangements may not involve the exchange of cash, but rather be based on revenue sharing, and contingent on sales eventually being generated. What looks like a huge portal might be run by a handful of people in a garage.
Keep that model in mind as you build your own company, and also remember it when evaluating and negotiating partnerships. What does your partner bring to the plate directly, and what comes from partners of that partner? And how likely is it that the key players will be able to deliver what they have committed for on the same terms for the long run?
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